“The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.” -- Henry David Thoreau

About Me

Editor for publishing company by day; skald in the Hall of Fire by night; and member of the S.H.I.E.L.D.W.A.L.L.
Essayist and reviewer for numerous web and print-based fantasy publications, including The Cimmerian, Black Gate, Mythprint, REH: Two-Gun Raconteur, The Dark Man, and SFFaudio.com.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison, a review

More than 30 years ago in the introduction to Strange Wine (1978) Harlan Ellison
railed against television, declaring it the death knell of books and reading. In
his usual blunt style:

I now believe that television
itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us
endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul
deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing.
It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.

It’s hard to say whether Ellison’s fears were misplaced or
have come to fruition. I’ve seen reports from the National Endowment for the Arts
declaring that reading is in crisis and Americans are reading both less, and
less well; opposing reports state that books like Harry Potter have revived reading in old and young alike, and that
e-readers have made reading cool again, opening up an old pastime with new
technology.

Perhaps Ellison’s essay is showing a little age. Television
sets—the glass teat, as he once famously described them—are now competing with
computer screens for our national attention, and computers of course allow us
to both passively consume entertainment like TV while granting us more access
to information and an enormous variety of reading material, albeit of variable
quality. Worth noting too is the fact that Ellison was writing in an age of The
Mary Tyler Moore Show and Bewitched; perhaps TV has gotten better since then (then
I think of The Bachelor and Fear Factor and wonder if gladiatorial combats
aren’t coming next). But I think there’s a kernel of truth to Ellison’s rant
about television: I wonder if there isn’t something being lost with the decline
of paper books, which promote the act of sustained reading without ready access
to an internet browser.

All that said, Strange
Wine is not a literary masterpiece that proves reading is definitively better
than watching TV; I’d rate it well behind his superb collection Deathbird Stories. There are a few gems
here, but they lie amid a bevy of solid but unspectacular EC Comics-style
gotcha stories. In other words, stuff you can find on reruns of the Twilight
Zone or Creepshow. But a few entries move us beyond what TV typically offers, challenging stories that embrace ambiguity and don’t allow for easy,
comfortable analysis. Others are designed to grasp you by the shoulders and
wake you up to the cold brutality of the world and the meaningless of our
existence, a sensation you’re not likely to encounter watching The Biggest
Loser.

Strange Wine
contains 15 stories and the introductory essay “Revealed at Last! What Killed
the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Terrific Yourself.” The latter is
Ellison’s rant on television, provocative and entertaining and very uniquely
Ellison. Some of the most enjoyable bits of Strange
Wine are Harlan being Harlan is his introductions (we get a lot of Harlan,
who offers an introduction for each story). Ellison is a divisive figure in SFF
circles, to say the least. Personally I’ve always liked the guy. Sure I don’t
agree with everything he says but people like him make the world a more
interesting place to live in. He’s also a tireless advocate for writer’s rights,
adult literacy and reading, admirable causes all.

As far as the stories go, “Seeing” is amazing. In the
introduction Ellison says he dreamed up the idea for the story when he
envisioned eyes that could see in new and strange ways. “Seeing” has a
dystopian Blade Runner vibe, a dying, polluted Earth where people are abducted
off the streets and their bodyparts sold to the rich. It’s also a rumination on
what it means to truly see, and how lucky we are as humans with our limited
vision. If we could see the past and future of our own short lives and the
darkness we come from, and into which we return, we’d go mad. We are vessels,
surrounded by darkness, bound for other places, and it’s better that way.

“The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has
Gone Flat” (what a title) is about a group of aliens who convene on the planet
Vindemiatrix Σ. The Universe is now 50 billion years old, “and it was
tired,” in entropy and nearing a final heat death. The aliens have done it all
and seen it all and are afflicted with ennui, but during their strange meeting
(they share sounds with each other in a form of extra-lingual communication)
they hear a sound that presages what lies beyond the end of the universe. It’s
the sound of reality and finally wakes them up from their torpor. It’s not
necessarily a happy sound but nor is it the sound of absolute despair.

Some others I liked included “Croatoan,” an unsettling story
about certain… things flushed down the toilets that live in the sewers of a
city. “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is about a concentration camp survivor
who sees the ghosts of tried, convicted, and executed Nazi war criminals
walking the streets. It’s one of those “those who forget history are doomed to
repeat it” type of stories (Ellison is fond of heavy-handed didacticism in his
stories, which often serve as dire warnings about where we are headed as a race
unless we avert our current course). “Strange Wine” is a moving (and
disturbing) story about an old man struggling to make sense of the tragedy in
his life. It’s a very personal story by Ellison, who in the introduction admits
“I’ll be damned if I can make any sense out of life. It gets more complex the
longer I keep breathing.” I can identify.

A few stories are rather forgettable: “The New York Review
of Bird” is Ellison’s revenge-fantasy perpetuated against tin-eared critics and
inattentive booksellers, and tries to be funny but falls flat; “Working with
the Little People” is about a writer who loses his creative spark and falls
into despair until a group of gremlins answer his prayers and begin pounding
away with incredible stories that flow from his typewriter. I found it a rather
silly and telegraphed tale.

But overall this is solid stuff from Ellison. I own the 1979
paperback pictured here but Strange Wine
was reissued in 2004 and is readily available. Recommended.

8 comments:

Harlan Ellison is indeed an articulate and often amusing fellow. Yet sometimes I wish he would shut up about all the admirable causes he likes to crusade for. To borrow an expression from George Orwell, his belligerent rhetoric accomplishes nothing but to preach to the converted, and it may deconvert a few of those.

TV provides some of the best storytelling available right now — far superior to the big screen. The Sopranos, The Wire, Justified, Game of Thrones, Sons of Anarchy, The Shield... This ain't no Mary Tyler Moore show...

and what about the stories of harlan Ellison himself for shows like The new twilight zone?

by the way what have you got against The Mary Tyler Moore show? is that the show with Edward Asner?

classic tv shows like the american anthologies series Twilight zone, Night gallery, Tales from the darkside... or english traditional dramas like Upstairs, downastairs are much better than silly shows (for not saying something stronger) like Lost, althought I'm not a great fan of modern tv series

"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."